People-to-People Contact in South Asia
by Navnita Chadha Behera, Victor Gunawardena, Shahid Kardar, Raisul Awal Mahmood
Manohar, Delhi, 2000, 143 pp., INR 270
After spending much of 2000 d ing research on the quality of interaction among South Asian academics, activists, and so-called "track-II" and "track III" participants, I sat down to read People-to- People Contact in South Asia in mid-January 2001. This is a book put together from a project executed by the Colombo-based Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS) with chapter contributions from four South Asian scholars. Working on the assumption that the existing difficult visa-regime is the main culprit blocking the flowering of people-to-people contact in South Asia, the contributors highlight different aspects of this problem and offer ideas to resolve them.
Raisul Awal Mahmood, a senior fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), looks at the difficulties faced by a Bangladeshi national in getting a visa to other SAARC countries. He argues that the "amount of paperwork involved, the time required to process it, uncertainties, and above all, the attitude and behaviour of concerned authorities cause great difficulties to obtain a visa to travel across SAARC countries." Such impediments have a negative effect on business travel and on transaction costs related to decisions that affect trade and investment.
In a useful analysis of the paperwork involved, Mahmood finds no consistent pattern between the various SAARC countries with respect to the information sought and documents required. These variations range from the no-visa requirement for a Bangladeshi to visit Bhutan to an eight-page form to be filled out in the case of India. Apart from the forms, the actual procedure and the time involved in obtaining a visa also vary, in part due to the location and the limited staff of the visa-issuing authority.